Consider this the latest installment in an ongoing series on the
right-left convergence. Just yesterday Idrees Ahmed, the author of a
devastating critique of Sy Hersh’s articles blaming the rebels for the
sarin gas attacks in Syria, brought my attention to an article in The
National Interest by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett titled “A Middle
East Tragedy: Obama’s Syria-Policy Disaster” that has appeared in one
form or another at least a thousand times over the past four years.
Conversely, there is no polling or other evidence suggesting that
anywhere close to a majority of Syrians wants Assad replaced by some
part of the opposition. Indeed, the opposition’s popularity appears to
be declining as oppositionists become ever more deeply divided and ever
more dominated inside Syria by Al Qaeda-like jihadis. Just last year,
NATO estimated that popular support for the opposition may have shrunk
to as low as 10 percent of the Syrian public.
To give you an idea of the meretricious character of this sort of
punditry, the ‘estimated’ link in the paragraph above is to an article
in http://www.worldtribune.com, a website that was launched by one of
Reverend Moon’s editors at the Washington Times. A 2003 New Yorker
magazine article on the World Tribune indicates its willingness to play
fast and loose with the facts:
Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking
headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an
enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One
such story last week began, “U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq’s weapons
of mass destruction have finally been located.” The apparent scoop—of
stop-the-presses significance—was unsigned, and billed as a “special to
World Tribune.com.”
So things come full circle. Friends of the Syrian dictatorship write
articles “proving” that al-Assad has the support of 90 percent of the
population based on lies that appear in a website that was a key backer
of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/06/07/syria-and-the-national-interest/
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